Like many holy trinity MMOs featuring tanks, healers, and damage dealers, the DPS role in Final Fantasy XIV is by far the most popular. Capable of pumping out more damage than their healer and tank counterparts and typically holding less responsibility, the DPS role is well-suited for new players looking to acquaint themselves with FFXIV, as well as hardcore players keen to squeeze out every last bit of damage they can manage.
While DPS players rarely have to think about moving a boss or managing their party’s health, they can still be a critical factor in determining the outcome of an encounter, and party members are sure to feel the difference between an average DPS player and a great one. From pressing your buttons, to positioning your character, to situational awareness, this guide will leave you well-equipped to start your DPS journey.
Know your ABCs - Always Be Casting
Always Be Casting, sometimes called the ABCs of FFXIV, is a fundamental pillar to playing all roles, but is especially significant to DPS players. As a DPS, your primary responsibility is to pump out damage. While learning your job’s rotation is an obvious first step, a good universal rule to improve your damage is to spend as much time as possible attacking, and as little time as possible standing around.
The basic idea of the ABCs is to use your abilities as soon as your global cooldown (GCD) recovers to ensure there’s no delay between attacks. Even if you’re repositioning, dodging attacks, or executing mechanics, your GCDs should always be rolling. Casting as much as possible applies to your major abilities with long cooldowns as well. For many abilities, this means simply pressing them as soon as their cooldowns come up, but for some jobs this requires planning ahead to ensure they have enough resources or fulfill certain conditions to enable their activation.
GCDs and weaving
An essential technique to maximize your ability usage and avoid disruption to your GCD is known as weaving. While most weaponskills and spells share the global cooldown, many abilities are able to be used even while GCDs are recovering, known as off-global cooldowns, or oGCDs. Although oGCDs are listed as instant casts, they impose a brief delay before another ability can be used. In most cases, this limits you to two oGCDs before your GCD recovers, known as double-weaving. As you learn your job, be sure to look out for situations where weaving can clip into your GCD and adjust accordingly, such as oGCDs with lengthy animations, or special phases with a shortened GCD.
Jobs often have their own unique way of squeezing out extra GCDs too. For example, casters can preposition themselves in safe areas, eke out small bits of movement between spells, or use instant spells to facilitate movement and double-weaving. Melee DPS can wait until the last second to dodge disruptive AoEs in order to stay in melee range for as long as possible, and use gap closers to quickly return. Be sure to experiment and look for ways your own job can always be casting.
DPS Role Actions
Role actions are a category of abilities that are shared across all jobs within a role. Although these abilities don’t deal any damage, using them effectively can still play a large impact on your performance as a DPS.
Melee DPS Role Actions
- Feint: Reduces the damage a target deals, with greater mitigation applying to physical damage. Great for mitigating unavoidable damage.
- Arm’s Length: Prevents most knockback and draw-in effects. Useful for ignoring effects that force you out of melee range or into unfavorable positions.
- True North: Guarantees the activation of all positional bonus effects for 10 seconds.
- Second Wind: A modestly-sized instant self-heal, great for emergency situations.
- Bloodbath: Heals you based on a portion of damage dealt for 20 seconds. Can be saved for burst windows to increase the amount healed. Good for sustaining your health over its duration.
- Leg Sweep: Stuns a target for three seconds. While most bosses are immune to stuns, this can be used on some mobs to interrupt their casts.
Physical Ranged DPS Role Actions
- Head Graze: Interrupts an enemies castbar. Interruptible abilities feature a flashing red outline around their castbar.
- Arm’s Length: Prevents most knockback and draw-in effects. Useful for ignoring effects that force you into unfavorable positions.
- Second Wind: A modestly-sized instant self-heal, great for emergency situations.
- Peloton: A party-wide movement buff effective only outside of combat. Helpful when traveling between packs of enemies.
- Leg Graze: Applies the heavy debuff, slowing the target’s movement. While often unused, this ability sees rare use cases in controlling adds in boss mechanics.
- Foot Graze: Applies the bind debuff, preventing movement. Widely unused as most relevant enemies are immune.
Caster DPS Role Actions
- Addle: Reduces the damage a target deals, with greater mitigation applying to magical damage. Great for mitigating unavoidable damage.
- Swiftcast: Removes the cast time of your next spell. Can be used to speed up a long-cast time spell, or create time to reposition and weave oGCDs.
- Surecast: Prevents most knockback and draw-in effects. Useful for ignoring movement effects that cancel your casts or force you into unfavorable positions.
- Lucid Dreaming: Regenerates your mana over time.
- Repose: Applies the sleep debuff to enemies in an AoE around your target. Widely unused as most relevant enemies are immune.
Positioning
A dead DPS does no damage, and positioning yourself intelligently is an easy way to keep you on your feet. While the positions each player wants to be in can differ based on their job and the specific encounter, there are some universal guidelines applicable to all DPS that can help you avoid an untimely demise.
The most important thing to keep in mind is your positioning in relation to your target. When selecting a target, a target ring will appear on the ground around them, providing a visual indicator of which direction the target is facing. The target ring is divided into four quadrants, with the open segment of the target ring indicating the rear, the solid arrow at the front of the target ring indicating the fore, and the hollow arrows on the sides of the target ring indicating the flanks.
Many enemies have attacks lethal to DPS players, striking an area in front of them without telegraphs. This makes the front of a target particularly dangerous to be standing in, and this area should be reserved for tank players to take the brunt of the damage alone.
Conversely, the rear and flank of a target is relatively safe, making it a good place to stand and deal damage. Melee jobs in particular will want to position between the flank and rear of their target to facilitate their positional attacks. As a caveat, if a target’s ring is a complete circle with no open segment for the rear, or a large boss with only a semicircle available to attack, all positional bonuses will activate regardless of where they are used from.
Another factor to consider is the distance between you and your party members. While a major advantage of casters and physical ranged DPS jobs is their ability to attack from a distance, it’s not always a good idea to be standing at your maximum attack range.
Standing far away puts you at risk of outranging beneficial buffs and healing from your teammates, and nothing is more frustrating to your healers than making them work overtime because someone was standing in the corner of an arena. If you don’t have a specific reason to be standing far away, it is often better to stand with the rest of your party.
Situational Awareness
Being aware of changes in a fight and correctly adapting on the fly is a major factor separating good DPS players from great DPS players. Requiring a keen eye, game knowledge, and familiarity with one’s job, having good awareness allows players to take advantage of a situation to increase their damage output or provide critical support in a party’s time of need.
At a basic level, situational awareness encompasses things like using AoE abilities when fighting multiple targets, using interrupting skills to cancel an enemy’s ability, or spending supportive cooldowns and role skills to weaken raid-wide attacks. As you become more familiar with a fight, you may find opportunities to make non-standard decisions with your rotation to take advantage of a particular encounter’s design.
For example, players might save gap-closing abilities or instant-cast spells they would usually use on cooldown in anticipation of an upcoming attack requiring high mobility. Conversely, in situations where a boss is at low health, players may expend job gauges and damaging cooldowns they would normally save for a burst window in order to end the encounter before a dangerous ability finishes casting, or if they recognize the boss will not survive to see the next burst window.
These spur-of-the-moment situations are also opportunities for your job’s unique traits to shine. Red Mages and Summoners are equipped to revive fallen teammates in battle, allowing for clutch recoveries from the brink of defeat, while physical ranged jobs' freedom of movement make them well-suited for baiting targeted mechanics and AoEs away from their less mobile party members. As you become more familiar with your job, consider what ways your job's traits and abilities could be used to best serve you and your party.
While the iceberg of playing a DPS job extends far deeper than these few tips, you should be well-prepared to venture forth and start thinking about ways you can stand out as an exceptional DPS player.
